November 12 2008

Microsoft announced Small Business Server 2008 and Essential Business Server 2008 earlier today. The emphasis of their press release seems to be about saving time and money, displaying a good grasp of their marketing 101 lessons:

They are designed and priced to help customers save money and compete more successfully in the global marketplace.

"If time equals money, then we're saving a lot of money," said Rob Harris of Robby Gordon Motorsports.

Wow, sign me up! But wait, there's more:

Based on feedback directly from customers, SBS and EBS greatly help reduce the setup and ongoing management of IT, while enabling new scenarios to enhance end-user productivity, as well as saving companies money on license costs.

"We used to spend 15 hours a month doing upgrades," said Tom Goddard, director of Information Technology for Lee Company. "Instead, with EBS, this is down to two hours a week.

Two hours a week for upgrades? Call me right now! I can't wait!

Bilal Jaffrey, who does all sorts of great marketing stuff for Lotus Foundations, caught this first, and calls MS out:

I am confused. As a small business owner, I am looking for maximum uptime and minimum IT headaches. Small Business owners cannot afford to have downtime, they don't have backup data centers in place nor they can afford to have in house IT guy to constantly upgrade the darn server.

Should I even talk about the fact that Microsoft's own case study on Essential Business Server deployment outlines deployment time reduction from 4 months to 1 month. That is right, a month to setup a small business server? Lotus Foundations take 30 minutes.